IP Watchdog

Amanda G. Ciccatelli
February 21, 2018

Chinese toymaker VTech recently settled charges with the FTC in the first-ever case involving internet-connected toys. VTech became a victim of cyber attackers back in 2015, when hackers got access to the company’s online database and compromised accounts of over 11 million, which included data for about 6.37 million children.

Michael Bahar, head of Eversheds Sutherland’s U.S. Global Cybersecurity and Privacy Practice, and former General Counsel to the House Intelligence Committee, and Mitzi L. Hill, technology partner at Taylor English Duma LLP, sat down with IPWatchdog to discuss this case and related concerns including: (1) how the FTC’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) update indicates a larger regulatory effort over Internet of Things; (2) why smart devices are more vulnerable to security threats and privacy issues than ever; (3) what kind of regulatory and legal efforts manufacturers can expect; and (4) how businesses can stay compliant with the FTC and protect themselves against cyber breaches.

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CYRUS FARIVAR – 2/20/2018

Facebook has agreed to give a hotshot Stanford economist unprecedented access to its internal data as a way to better understand income disparity in the United States.

According to Politico, which first broke the news on Tuesday morning, the investigation will be led by Raj Chetty, who won a 2012 MacArthur Genius grant and is well-known for his analysis of America’s social and economic problems. Facebook did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, but the company “confirmed the broad contours of its partnership with Chetty” to Politico.

“We’re using social networks, and measuring interactions there, to understand the role of social capital much better than we’ve been able to,” Chetty told the political news site in January.

It is not clear exactly what data Facebook has made available to Chetty and his researchers or how personal and private information would be protected. The study has apparently been already underway for at least six months, however.

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The Supreme Court has denied a petition for a writ of certiorari in Carefirst, Inc. v. Attias, a case concerning standing to sue in data breach cases. Consumers had sued health insurer Carefirst after faulty security practices allowed hackers to obtain 1.1 million customer records. EPIC filed an amicus brief backing the consumers, arguing that if “companies fail to invest in reasonable security measures, then consumers will continue to face harm from data breaches.” The federal appeals court agreed with EPIC and held that consumers may sue companies that fail to safeguard their personal data. Carefirst appealed the decision, but the Supreme Court chose not to take the case. EPIC regularly files amicus briefs defending standing in consumer privacy cases, most recently in Eichenberger v. ESPN, where the Ninth Circuit also held for consumers, as well as Gubala v. Time Warner Cable and In re SuperValu Customer Data Security Breach Litigation.

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DAN GOODIN – 2/15/2018

Ars Technica

Passports, driver licenses, and other sensitive documentation for thousands of FedEx customers were left online, possibly for years, in a blunder that left the information available to identity thieves and other malicious actors, researchers said Thursday.

In all, Kromtech Security Center said, researchers found 119,000 scanned documents stored in a publicly available Amazon S3 bucket. The photo ID scans were accompanied by completed US Postal Service forms that included names, home addresses, and phone numbers of people who requested to have mail delivered by an authorized agent.

“Citizens from all over the world left their scanned IDs—Mexico, Canada, EU countries, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Japan, Malaysia, China, Australia—to name a few,” Kromtech researchers wrote.

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 Ars Technica

CYRUS FARIVAR – 2/3/2018

Lt. Saul Jaeger, who commands the traffic unit at the Mountain View Police Department, remembers the first time a few years ago when he was given a demo of Waymo’s self-driving cars.

Jaeger was not only interested from a professional point of view, but also as a citizen. After all, he lives in Mountain View near one of the Waymo facilities. He watched in awe as the engineers showed him the autonomous vehicle’s (AV) own view. This screen reduces everything to line drawings and other simplified sensory inputs.

“It’s incredible,” he told Ars. “It felt like The Matrix, when they flip the switch—it’s seeing everything, it’s seeing way more than you or I can—and it’s making decisions.”

Jaeger, a veteran of the department, said that as someone whose job requires that he “reconstruct” serious traffic accidents, he could only dream of a machine that captured as much as an AV does.

“I felt like I was in heaven,” he said. “It’s like instant replay in the NFL, I can tell what happened. The engineers looked at each other like, ‘Aw, crap.'”

Instantly, Jaeger realized that the promise of AVs to not only be safer for those inside the car, but it may also, potentially, be a way for law enforcement to collect data and information about everything else around it.

For now, law enforcement in one major hub of AV development and testing seems to have few clear ideas as to how they will integrate these vehicles into their traffic enforcement practices, much less their investigative process.

But AVs could soon become—absent a notable change in the law—a TiVo-on-the-ground. In other words, as auto manufacturers and tech companies race to take AVs mainstream, they may become a gold mine for law enforcement.

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Facial recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Some commercial software can now tell the gender of a person in a photograph.

When the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 percent of the time.

But the darker the skin, the more errors arise — up to nearly 35 percent for images of darker skinned women, according to a new study that breaks fresh ground by measuring how the technology works on people of different races and gender.

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The Autonomous Selfie Drone
Is Here. Is Society Ready for It?

EPIC and other leading open government organizations urged Congress to promote transparency and accountability of the Intelligence agencies. The groups called for the release of annual public reports, all significant opinions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and an accounting on the number of Americans subject tp foreign intelligence surveillance. EPIC previously called on lawmakers to require federal agencies to obtain a warrant before searching information about Americans in foreign intelligence databases. Through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, EPIC obtained a report detailing the FBI’s failure to follow procedures regarding the use of foreign intelligence data for a domestic criminal investigation. EPIC has also testified in Congress on reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

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